by the Editor
There's a story that's told about the natives of Tierra del Fuego when the ship of Captain Cook sailed into their bay. The natives, it's said, couldn't see the ship. When they looked out, they saw nothing but what they expected to see. The stories they told themselves about what could and couldn't be there didn't include the white sails and the tall masts and the white men, so they went, as if it wasn't there, serenely on their way. Needless to say, they were not prepared for what happened next.
I've thought about that story a lot. Sometimes, when I'm talking to someone, or reading something they've said, I can see the stories they've been told or they tell themselves. Sometimes the stories are astonishing ones, ones that I wouldn't ever have been able to imagine on my own, visionary stories that make me see the almost invisible ships on the horizon. William Blake tells stories like that. A lot of times, though, the stories are very limited ones, clung to, or, worse, smugly held onto. Stories like: "this is the best of all possible worlds." Or: "we are better/smarter/kinder than they are." Or: "my life is good."
I suppose it was the same with the natives of Tierra del Fuego. "This is a day like any other. It has always been this way and it will never change." They couldn't see the white ships on the bay. Those ships weren't part of any storyline they knew. And because their stories were limited to those of the past, it wasn't going to be possible for them to see what would happen after these new stories landed on the shore. They were helpless in the grip of stories that couldn't change. Those stories had hardened into truths. But they weren't truths. They were ways of finding the truth, which is not the same thing at all. They were stories. And the thing about stories is: they have to change. They have to grow or they die.
If you can't see what's on the bay, you can't see what you have to do to meet it. In order to act effectively, you have to be able to tell the story so that it includes everything that's in front of you. No cheating. Any story that's told to protect you from knowing something evil about yourself or a loved one, any story that's meant to give you a safe place to hide, these stories are going to, if not come to a bad end, at least imprison you in a limited narrative. And what good can come from putting yourself in jail?
For example: if in every story you tell yourself, you're the hero, someone else is going to have to be the villain. And that someone is going to have to be punished by the story's end. So someone's going to suffer. Someone's going to win, someone's going to lose. How many resentful battles between husband and wife have happened, ruining time that could have had a happier story line for all, because both sides were the heroes of their own stories? And, between peoples, how many wars?
When we tell ourselves stories, we are always the heroes. But what if it could be otherwise? What if we didn't have to tell ourselves stories that proved, always and inevitably, that we were the Innocent, the Good, the Triumphant? What if we didn't have to identify in our stories with the Winners, the Rich, the Powerful? What if we could, as Harvey Lillywhite hopes this month in his elegant and deceptively simple essay, Why I Am Not A Man, find another story, and that one just what is, where we are, who we are and what we see, right now, in front of us, right here, now?
What if it was possible to change the stories? Would that change the world? I think it would. I really think it would. And of course we have to start with the stories we tell ourselves.
Welcome back.